The Canadian Advanced Network For Astronomical Research

The Canadian Advanced Network For Astronomical Research (CANFAR) is a newly-funded 2.5-year project that will deliver an operational system for the delivery, processing, storage, analysis, and distribution of very large astronomical datasets. The goal of CANFAR, is to support forefront scientific discovery by members of major Canadian astronomical surveys. CANFAR will initially target six specific survey teams, using them to identify the needs of the community and to test services as they are developed. Ultimately the system will support an even broader range of projects in Canada and internationally. The CANFAR infrastructure will be implemented as an International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA)-compliant web service infrastructure. All front-facing services will make use of IVOA protocols. A challenging feature of the proposal is to channel survey data through the Canadian research network to grid resources (components of Compute Canada). Internal services will make use of technologies from the grid computing community for storage, meta-scheduling, provisioning and virtualization. This paper will describe the context in which this project took shape, the high-level architecture of the infrastructure and development plan.